“I am,” I whispered.
His hand moved over me again, more certain, and I felt every second of it, every place he chose to linger, every pause that stretched just long enough to make me feel it before he moved again.
“That’s it,” he said, his voice rougher now, closer to losing control. “Don’t hold back.”
I didn’t. I let it take me, the heat of him, the sound of my name on his mouth as he moanedNovaagainst my flesh when his body met mine by thrust, the way he stayed with me through every shift of it, like he had been waiting for this long enough to know exactly what to do with it now that he had it.
And for the first time, I didn’t try to manage any of it. I stayed exactly where he told me to. With him.
Chapter 18
DEION
I went toBrooklyn on Thursday with Deion driving. He had offered before I could ask, pulling up at eight in the morning in his Volvo SUV with coffee from the place on Cheltenham he liked after taking a PTO from work. We took the bridge and the turnpike north, the familiar New Jersey flat giving way to the industrial corridor and then the density of approaching New York, the skyline appearing at the horizon and growing the way it always did, insisting upon itself.
He was quiet on the drive in the way he was when something needed room, but brightened as we spent the morning visiting a few shops that had been on our radar before I shifted into business mode.
Yolanda met us at her lounge in Fort Greene just after two. The space was still under construction. It was a ground-floor room on a block anchored by a coffee shop and a bookstore. A neighborhood gathered around whenit decided culture mattered. Inside, it was half built, raw concrete underfoot, exposed brick along the north wall, a bar running the length of the south side. The bones were visible.
I stepped in and stopped a few feet from the door, noticing the acoustics were off. The ceiling ran too high for the width of the room, which meant the bass would pool toward the center. The bar, all hard surface, would throw sound back into the space with just enough delay to muddy the midrange.
Yolanda was already watching me. I hadn’t even said hello, and I could feel myself moving through the room like I had been called there to take it apart piece by piece.
“Tell me,” she said, so I did.
She waved over the contractor, David, who introduced himself midway through explaining he’d been building out restaurant spaces for fifteen years. He listened with the careful attention of someone realizing this wasn’t a conversation he was used to having.
“She’s the ear,” Yolanda said. “Do what the ear says. Otherwise we’ve all spent time and money building something nobody can actually hear.”
Deion stayed back while we talked, settling into a folding chair near the rear of the space, grading papers between glances up. He didn’t insert himself. He didn’t need to. His presence held where it was.
When we finished, I stood in the doorway and listened again, the way I had learned to listen to a room, with my body first and everything else after. There was still work to be done, but the foundation was right.
“It can be good,” I said. “But not until the treatment’s in and the equipment is placed correctly. When it is, the person at table four will hear the same thing as the person at table one.”
“That’s what I’m trying to build,” Yolanda said. She shook my hand, then glanced past me at Deion, who was making his way over toward us to thank Yolanda for having us.
An hour later, we were headed back. He reached across the center console and took my hand, holding it the way he had started to without asking, and I let him, my fingers settling into his like they had already agreed to it.
I had always been good at keeping things in their place, arranging my life so everything had a purpose and somewhere to go, even the things I hadn’t quite dealt with yet, which I filed away neatly and ignored with confidence as long as nothing spilled out. Deion had lived there easily for years, in a space that made sense, that didn’t ask more of me than I was willing to give.
But sitting there with his hand wrapped around mine, I could feel that system starting to give, like a drawer I had been overfilling for a while now finally deciding it was done cooperating, everything inside it shifting forward at once whether I was ready for it or not.
Chapter 19
NOVA
Three months later,Deion picked me up at four, my totes already in my arms when he pulled up. He looked them, then at me, took the bags without a word, and set them carefully in the back seat on top of his jacket so it wouldn’t slide.
I spent the first part of the drive nervous as hell. By the time we hit the turnpike, I was thinking about my mom.
Celeste James had played rooms all over the city and a few outside it, and she had never once, as far as I knew, walked into one without knowing exactly what she was bringing with her. That wasn’t helping me now, but I held on to it anyway, turning it over, looking for something useful in it.
What I held on to was this. She had been nervous before every set. She told me that once when I was fifteen, standing in the kitchen while she was getting ready to leave. I had asked her why she was putting on makeup twice. Shesaid,I’m nervous, baby. I looked at her like that didn’t make sense, and she met my eyes in the mirror and said,About whether the room is going to let me in.
Every time,she said.Nervous every single time.The shaking means you care. The day your hands stop shaking is the day you stop giving a damn about the room.
My hands were shaking. Good. That meant I hadn’t made the mistake of deciding in advance that I already knew what the room needed, the mistake that turned DJs into jukeboxes.
